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  • Conflicted Colony: Critical Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland and Labrador by Kurt Korneski
  • Miriam Wright
Kurt Korneski. Conflicted Colony: Critical Episodes in Nineteenth-Century Newfoundland and Labrador. McGill-Queen's University Press. xii, 236. $34.95

One of the challenges historians of Newfoundland and Labrador often face is the wider public's perceptions of the province's character and history derived from the very strong "branding" provided in television tourism advertisements and popular culture. Images of a peaceful, friendly, independent (and white) rural people set against dramatic and colourful landscapes may book plane tickets, but they can be deceiving when thinking about the former British colony's history. Kurt Korneski's new book Conflicted Colony meets that challenge, offering glimpses into state and society on the eastern edge of North America that is more complex, conflicted, yet ultimately more engaging than the sweet blandness of the tourism copy. Employing insights from social, economic, ecological, spatial, and "new" diplomatic history as well as borderland approaches, Korneski focuses on five case studies in nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador. While varied, the cases all involve conflicts between the St. John's-based colonial and merchant elites, localized populations, and outside imperial powers in the midst of an often-precarious resourcebased economy. These include a dispute over Americans catching bait, the use of seine nets in Fortune Bay, conflicts over salmon fishing and claims to the resource in Hamilton Inlet, Labrador, and the Newfoundland's government's attempts to pursue landward-based development (specifically building a railway) on the Avalon Peninsula. Also explored are two cases involving fishing and governance on Newfoundland's west coast, complicated by the "French Shore," where in a series of diplomatic negotiations through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, France received rights to fish and establish shore installations in an otherwise British-claimed colony. [End Page 475]

While a number of these conflicts have previously been discussed by historians, Korneski brings a fresh approach, arguing convincingly that these incidents can be better understood through a borderlands framework. St. Georges Bay, Fortune Bay, coastal Labrador, and even the Avalon Peninsula, he suggests, were borderlands – in-between places where people negotiated their lives in the larger environment of overlapping social, economic, cultural, imperial, and political relationships. Korneski carefully layers the stories, exploring everything from the culturally diverse populations, to their localized use of resources, to their relationships and trading practices with French, American, and Nova Scotian fishers and traders, to merchants and state authorities from St. John's. The local and the global interconnect, and we see, for example, how fishers destroying seine nets in Fortune Bay or Margaret Cullen of Foxtrap protesting the Newfoundland railway were tied to both regional and international forces. Korneski's attentions to individuals and families as they negotiated their ways through these environments as well as his sensitivities to ecological difference and change are particularly effective. What emerges is a complex, but enriched, picture of Newfoundland state formation, with localized sensibilities, identities, and sense of the world interacting with, and often resisting, directives and encroachments from St. John's as well as imperial powers. This work is a most welcome contribution to the literature on nineteenth-century Newfoundland and Labrador, problematizing ideas of a single "Newfoundland" and suggesting the possibilities of using spatial and borderland approaches to conceptualize this region.

Miriam Wright
Department of History, University of Windsor
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